With the end of summer approaching it's hop picking time in the Northern Hemisphere! And of course that means this year's batch of Northern Hemi fresh (aka wet) hop beers are currently being brewed across the country. Hops are basically a weed that bud a flower once a year, but despite the veracity of the plant the flower is rather fragile and is only optimal for harvest over about a two week period each year. Additionally once harvested the lupulin, volitile oils and other super awesome stuff that makes fabulous beer begin to dissipate. With this in mind the ideal wet hop beer is made the same day the hops are picked.

So we gathered up TestPilot MariBeth and little Natty and ventured out to Banner Springs Ranch organic hop and vegetable farm near Benton Crossing to pick fresh Cascade hops with our good friends from Mammoth Brewing Company. After picking our fill we pitched in and helped pick hops for MBC, and their forth coming wet harvest beer for this year. Heading back home we fired up our homebrew system and busted out a killer XPA (aka all day IPA). Basically this beer is a lighter alcohol IPA, but don't let the lower alcohol fool you, this beast has almost six pounds of fresh organic Cascade hops packed into the one barrel batch. So it's a single hop beer (meaning we only used one type of hops for the bittering, flavor and aroma hop additions), made with fresh (less than four hours old) locally grown Cascade hops. We don't really have a name that we're fond of yet, so let us know what you think on our Facebook page - Name that XPA.

Last Friday was the last Mammoth Village Championship Downhill race and our riders didn't disappoint with TestPilot 00 Jimmy Lim catching a podium spot, and three of our other boys in the top ten. Tragically with the end of summer comes the closing of the Mammoth Mountain bikepark... le sigh... But don't fret just yet, it should be open until early October, and with the Kamakaze Downhill Games slated for the first week of September we're pretty pumped up to see our DH TestPilot Team show up and put up some smoking fast times. If you can make it, be here.

Lastly on the location front we're slated to have our use permit for our proposed location presented to the Mono County Planning Commission on October 10th, and have been working closely with the Planning Department, Building Department, Public Utilities Department, Fire Marshal and everyone else involved to ensure we properly address all concerns and can make JLB a reality. So what that means is after we hear from the Planning Commission, we can hopefully obtain a conditional use permit, and move forward with the needed building renovations before it gets too snowy.